Tag: CBS

When I first grew old enough to watch late night television there were only two choices; the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and then Late Night with David Letterman. Well, there was really only one choice; Letterman. Carson was great, sure, but he was not ours, not in the way Dave was. From the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties, it was Dave who we stayed up late to watch, Dave who we talked about in school the next day, and Dave we all mimicked when we were trying to be funny. It seems strange now, as Dave is about the same age as my parents and they never seemed hip, but somehow he was ours.

Like this:

“Why can’t HBO be like Netflix?” That is the question a friend asked me the other day. She was annoyed that she couldn’t subscribe to HBO without having a cable subscription. I started to explain it to her but it got very complicated and the more I spoke and thought about it the more I realized I couldn’t answer it easily.

The topic of television and Netflix and HBO and streaming and broadcast and cable and so on is all very complicated. I decided maybe its better to start from the (sort of) beginning and go from there.

Although I watch The Good Wife, I don’t usually write about it because it’s on network television, which means that there are a lot of episodes and I am not suited to keep up that type of pace. Basic and premium cable series with their shorter seasons are much more comfortable for me.

However, as you may have heard, something big happened in The Good Wife last Sunday. If you don’t know what it is or, more importantly, if you don’t want to know what it is, then stop reading.

I remember when The Good Wife debuted on CBS in 2009, and I remember it well because I had no interest in watching it at the time. To me it seemed like “just another network show” and I was pretty certain that a network drama could never be as interesting as a cable drama. And I probably would have gone along assuming that there was no reason to watch The Good Wife if I had never joined Twitter. I follow a number of TV critics on Twitter and I started to notice that some of them had good things to say about The Good Wife (I’m looking at you, Nussbaum) and some of them even thought the series was as good as anything on cable. That didn’t seem possible. Still, I was curious so I started watching The Good Wife on Amazon Prime, which has the first four seasons. Continue reading “When The Good Wife Got Me”

Thanks to the financing arrangement between CBS and Amazon, I am able to watch the summer series Under the Dome for free on Amazon Prime, albeit four days after the show airs. I was very happy about this situation for a few reasons. One, it allowed me to watch a show for free that had gained some critical buzz. Two, it helped justify the annual Amazon Prime expense. And three, it helped fill in that terrible period between the end of Mad Men and Game of Thrones and the start of Orange is the New Black and The Bridge. After watching two episodes, I’m beginning to think that being able to watch Under the Dome for free is not so great.

Last Friday, Tim Goodman had a post called “Lost in the Supermarket: How to Survive When There’s Too Much Good TV”. Tim’s point is that there is a lot of great series that should be watched but not everyone watches because there is too much to choose from. “Freedom of choice is gumming up the works.” This is similar to what Alan Sepinwall posted in April and echoes what a lot of people feel. Naturally, I have some thoughts.